Canberra’s Foreigner Affair
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Rock royalty has landed at theAustralian National University’s School of Music.
When American recording legend Foreigner takes to the stage at the National Convention Centre on Friday night, there will be a unique Canberra connection.
The world tour of the band which over the last four decades has given us hits such as “Urgent”, “Cold As Ice” and “I Wanna Know What Love Is”, is the result of a close collaboration with the head of the Australian National University’s (ANU) School of Music Professor Ken Lampl and his music producer wife Kirsten Axelholm Lampl.
The relationship between the School of Music and Foreigner—one of the highest-grossing bands of all time—was cemented on Wednesday when Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt presented frontman Mick Jones with the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Musical Achievement.
The Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist also admitted that Foreigner’s 1981 album “4” was the soundtrack to his high school years.
Mick, whose global accolades include 16 top-30 hits and sales in excess of 75 million records, as well as induction into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame, said he was genuinely thrilled to receive such an award from the ANU as “it almost makes me legit!”.
Foreigner frontman Mick Jones at the School of Music to receive the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Musical Achievement.
He was also thrilled to be performing with some School of Music students as Foreigner toured Australia over the next week, saying he felt a strong sense of duty to encourage new generations of musicians to find performance opportunities.
The tour will revolve around Foreigner’s new album, Foreigner with the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, which Ken and Kirsten helped orchestrate and produce. It debuted at Number One on the Billboard Classical and Classic Crossover Albums in May of this year.
Ken will leave his School of Music duties temporarily to conduct the 18-piece orchestra which will accompany the band on its Australian leg.
Head of the ANU’s School of Music Ken Lampl is conducting the orchestra as part of Foreigner’s Australian tour.
Ken left New York two years ago to come to the ANU to head the School of Music with a promise to make music education relevant and future-focused.
His Danish-born wife Kirsten—who is the School’s Outreach Coordinator—said she and Ken felt “so lucky to be able to give the students here this opportunity of a lifetime. They get to perform and collaborate with one of the most iconic rock bands in the world and be a part of a huge national tour playing the biggest venues of Australia.”
The musical couple has notched up two Billboard hit albums in recent years including another collaboration with US band Evanescence. On both projects they worked closely with New York native and Grammy-nominated American cellist and composer David Eggar, who has worked with Coldplay, Beyonce and The Who—as well as American film score producer Chuck Palmer.
Dave said the Foreigner collaboration had been negotiated over the internet for around nine months before the group all met in Lucerne, Switzerland two years ago to record with an 80-piece orchestra and a 45-piece choir.
The team is back together again in Canberra this week, with Dave playing with the band and giving masterclasses at the School ahead of Friday’s concert.
Dave said the process of translating the driving musical beats of Top-10 Foreigner songs into classical scores had been transformative for him as a musician.
“Mick placed his paintbrush on every movement—sometimes requiring up to 20 revisions…We did everything from Mozart-inspired magical theatre to a psychotic re-imagining of Vivaldi.
“Mick is a genius who pushed us to places we have never been before. And audiences love it.”
Mick said he just loved music, and while his expertise was not in classical composition, he could relate to certain composers and find contemporary relevance in 200-year-old scores.
“I certainly feel that all music schools need to be more modern and more relevant and that students need to get their heads around producing and recording and arranging.”
He also found the process of recording a classical album to be creatively freeing and, at times, surprising.
“I didn’t know how we were going to pull it off at first, but the result sounds incredibly powerful. It gives me chills to hear it the orchestral and the electronic sounds come together.”
Foreigner plays at the National Convention Centre on Friday from 8pm.
Main Photo: Dave Eggar, Ken Lampl and Kirsten Lampl.
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